Hall, who fights at 185 pounds – 50 more than Rousey, underestimated the former judo Olympic medalist intitially. He found that to be a terrible mistake.

“I said to myself, ‘I can get out of this,’” Hall told The Post. “Then she caught me and I was like, ‘Oh my God, this [expletive] is real.’”

Hall, a Queens resident, said Rousey got him in two armbars while grappling – and he couldn’t get out. He compared it to rolling with an anaconda or a cat…”You can’t grab her and if you do grab her, you’re [expletive],” Hall said with a laugh…

Last night’s installment of The Ultimate Fighter: Team Jones vs. Team Sonnen featured the season’s first two quarterfinal matchups along with some celebrity guest-appearances. Check out the complete video above, or read our recap below if you don’t have the patience for that sort of thing…

- After making into the quarterfinals with his wild card win over Kevin Casey, Bubba McDaniel admits that he doesn’t want to face Uriah Hall because he’s still haunted by Hall’s incredible knockout of Adam Cella. He’ll have to get comfortable with the matchup real quick, since they’re facing each other in the next episode. Coach Jones does his best to build up McDaniel’s confidence, but Bubba looks like a man facing the firing squad. I’ll go out on a limb and say that this little storyline ends with a nervous breakdown and a trip to the hospital.

- The first quarterfinal match will be Kelvin Gastelum (Team Sonnen) vs. Collin Hart (Team Jones). Jones thinks Hart’s jiu-jitsu is “extraordinary,” which will be their key to victory. Though Gastelum has a reputation as a wrestler, Sonnen sees him more as a brawler. But in a good way.

- Coach Sonnen makes good on his promise to give Kelvin seven minutes alone in a closet with Ronda Rousey. Nah. Actually, the UFC women’s bantamweight champ drops by to shake Kelvin’s hand and teach the boys some judo. “It was pretty awesome, you know, getting handled by her [nervous laughter],” Kelvin says. Ronda also drops some nuggets from her own fighting philosophy: “Fighting is about respect, and having respect for your opponent, but at the same time you have to have no respect for your opponent, ’cause you’re the one that’s supposed to walk out of there. They don’t have the right to beat you.”

Apologies in advance for dropping the ball on last week’s episode of The Ultimate Fighter: Jones vs. Sonnen, which we completely forgot to recap for reasons that are not immediately obvious (if only we could get Danga to set down the bong for like thirty seconds…). Long story short: Chael Sonnen emerged victorious from a Coaches Challenge that involved stacking tires with excavators (?) and Team Jones’ Dylan Andrews secured a spot in the quarterfinals with a majority decision victory over Zak Cummings. For this week’s “Wild Card” matchup, Team Jones’ Bubba McDaniel and Team Sonnen’s Kevin Casey were selected.

To find out which fighter secured the final spot in the TUF 17 bracket, as well as the rest of last night’s highlights, join us after the jump.

Last week, Team Jones was able to chalk up victory #2 after an injured Josh Samman blistered Swede Tor Troeng. With control finally back in their corner, Jon Jones decided to place his #1 pick, boxer Clint Hester, against Team Sonnen’s most decorated grappler in former police officer Jimmy Quinlan. It was a matchup that completely baffled Chael Sonnen, but will Jones’ unorthodox strategy pay off this time? Check out last night’s episode in full above and join us below for all the highlights.

- To kick things off this week, the house is treated to an ever-so-rare night on the town at a local Hooters establishment. Hooters: Our wings might taste like dirty bath water, but hey, tits! Fives are highed. Waitresses are groped. Gilbert Smith repeatedly finds ways to take his clothing off. And by the end of the night, Uriah Hall somehow manages to alienate himself from everyone even further. Collin Hart states his distaste for Hall’s attitude and hope he gets the chance to smash him.

- Hall admits that he hasn’t been sleeping well lately because his desire to nearly decapitate another housemate is eating away at him. You sure you still want a piece of this guy, Collin? Anyway, Sonnen’s assistant coach, Scott McQuary, tries to offer some zen-like wisdom to calm Uriah down. “A non-quiet mind is like a tractor,” he says, “You just can’t stop it.” Not sure which model of John Deere Scott’s used to plowing the fields with, but I’m pretty sure that the worst thing a tractor can do is give you gonorrhea.

Following his shocking upset loss to Kelvin Gastelum last week, Bubba McDaniel emerged a much humbler man in the opening moments of yesterday’s episode of The Ultimate Fighter: Jones vs. Sonnen. With Team Sonnen now back in control of the fight selections, this week’s matchup pitted highly-touted Swede Tor Troeng against Team Jones’ #2 pick and self-appointed captain Josh Samman. Was Samman able to overcome his nagging injuries and regain control for Team Jones, or did Troeng notch “another on for the bad guys?” Check out the entirety of last night’s episode above and join us after the jump for a full recap to find out.

- The episode kicks off with Jimmy Quinlan constructing a hammer for Tor (pronounced Thor. GET IT?). Although the prototype is laughably undersized, Quinlan showcases some MacGuyver-esque resourcefulness when building Troeng a life-sized model. If Josh Samman turns out to be less a human fighter and more a mole in need of whacking, he is pretty much screwed now.

- This week’s fight will be Bubba vs. Kelvin Gastelum, a 5-0 prospect (and full-time bail bondsman) from Arizona who, at 21 years old, is apparently the youngest competitor ever allowed onto The Ultimate Fighter. Jones picked the matchup because he sees Kelvin as Team Sonnen’s weakest link, and feels that Bubba’s vast experience edge and overall skills will make the difference in the fight. As usual, Coach Chael Sonnen tries to stay positive: “They don’t know what they handed you,” he tells Kelvin. “They handed you a big opportunity. Everybody here’s gotta win this tournament to get in the UFC. You just gotta beat this guy. This is your ticket, right here.”

- Kelvin is apparently a big Ronda Rousey fan, so Chael sweetens the pot by arranging for Ronda to call Kelvin and wish him luck, then promises that Ronda will come down and train with him if he wins. Man, that devious bastard.

- Chael Sonnen’s friendliness is still throwing Jon Jones for a loop; the champ likes to keep a “mystique” about himself and maintain a distance from future opponents, but Sonnen is making that difficult by constantly engaging Jones in pleasant conversation. Seriously, Chael, when are you going to start fucking with his parking spot and hiding his sandals?

- Adam Cella returns to the TUF house, still wearing his hospital gown, and claims he has no memory of the fight. Nevertheless, he tracks Uriah Hall down in the shower and jokingly asks Hall why he hit him so hard. Hall still feels uncomfortable about the fact that he nearly ended Cella’s life. The fact that he’s naked while Cella is trying to have a conversation with him does nothing to alleviate the tension.

- Kevin Casey suffered a cut over his right eye during his elimination-round fight against Eldon Sproat, and says he chose to fight Collin Hart — a wrestler — because he runs a lower risk of getting the cut re-opened against Hart than he would against a talented striker, like Bubba McDaniel, for example. So yeah, in a way he is ducking Bubba, but it makes sense from a strategic standpoint. Unfortunately, Collin vows to elbow Kevin Casey’s face in.

(“I’LL ASK YOU ONE MORE TIME, JAY, WHO TATTOOED THIS AFFLICTION SHIRT TO YOUR BACK?!”)

If the first month is any indication, 2013 is going to be a good year for MMA. There hasn’t been a significant injury in weeks (sorry Patricky), title fights are almost starting to make sense, and on top of it all, the UFC’s primetime ratings are slowly beginning their climb out of the abyss. Throw in the fact that Bruce Buffer’s upcoming autobiography is all but a shoe-in for a Pulitzer and we are left with little to complain about. It feels…good.

So before we jinx ourselves, let’s get to the great news regarding the preliminary portion of UFC 156, which was able to pull in record numbers during its run on FX last Saturday despite the fact that it featured several debuting fighters and not a lot of name power. As MMAFighting’s Dave Meltzer reports:

The number was a huge increase from the prelims on FX on Jan. 26 before the FOX network special from Chicago’s United Center which did 1,208,000 viewers.

The largest previous audience on FX for prelims before a big show came on July 7 when theUFC 148 prelims did 1.8 million viewers. But that was to be expected, since there was more interest in UFC on that day with the Anderson Silva vs. Chael Sonnen middleweight title rematch than any day over the past two years.

After almost ten minutes of research, we have determined that there are only two real explanations for the UFC’s sudden viewership jump:

The UFC was so damn proud of the Edson Barboza-esque knockout that Uriah Hall laid on Adam Cella during last night’s episode of TUF, that they actually made it available on YouTube along with some extended aftermath footage. And come to think of it, I can’t think of a knockout from the show’s history that was more impressive — or more brutal — than this one, especially considering how long Cella was unconscious. Cella did in fact go to the hospital for a CAT scan when he woke up, but it looks like the black dude in the ambulance that they kept showing in promos was footage from a different fight. (Could be the next one, actually.)

Hall’s win makes him an iron-clad front-runner for the $25,000 Knockout of the Season prize, and puts Team Sonnen up 2-0 in the preliminary round. A couple other notable moments from episode 3…

And tonight’s episode, featuring a showdown between the highly touted Uriah Hall (Team Sonnen) and the all but completely overlooked Adam Cella (Team Jones), promises to deliver not only one of the most violent KO’s in the show’s history, but in the history of the sport. That is according to noted TUF hypeman and occasional UFC president Dana White, of course.

So in order to do a little TUF-hyping of our own (I know right? WHAT YEAR IS THIS?!), we’ve thrown a preview of tonight’s episode above for you all to check out. And indeed, if the audience’s reaction is any indication, then someone is going down in a big way during the night’s main event. Unfortunately for you spoilerphobes, if you freeze frame the video around the 45 second mark, you can see that the fighter strapped to the stretcher appears to be of the African American persuasion. A bit of intentional misleading by the TUF production team, or a massive upset in the making? And more importantly, how many of you Taters will be tuning in to find out?

After the jump: A little more video hype, featuring a sneak peak of Ronda Rousey’s special on Real Sports, which airs February 19th on HBO. Liz Carmouche’s special, on the other hand, will be airing tonight on Lifetime After Dark in the form of a 30-second trailer during the network’s coveted 3 a.m. spot. We kid, we kid; Liz didn’t get a special.